Case Study: Oakland Unified School District achieves robust, scalable Wi-Fi for 37,000 students with Cisco Meraki

Oakland Unified School District installs robust network, supporting 37k students

Oakland Unified School District, a K‑12 district in northern California serving 37,000 students across 120 sites, needed to rapidly replace an aging, inconsistent wireless infrastructure to support statewide Common Core online testing and a sudden influx of classroom devices. With only five dedicated IT staff and 10,000 testing devices to onboard, CTO John Krull piloted and selected Cisco Meraki’s cloud‑managed Wireless LAN (MR) solution, including Meraki MR34 802.11ac access points, to standardize and scale the network quickly.

Cisco Meraki implemented 300+ Meraki 802.11ac APs on Chromebook carts and in classrooms and used the Meraki dashboard for centralized management, 802.1X/RADIUS authentication, and Layer 7 visibility. The rollout enabled Oakland USD to add 10,000 devices in weeks—doubling end‑user computing without hiring extra staff—provided reliable high‑density performance for online testing, improved speeds, WAN optimization and security, and gave IT better troubleshooting tools, culminating in a seamless Common Core testing experience.

Oakland Unified School District

John Krull

Chief Technology Officer